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I just got back from Dallas where I listened as Kevin Thompson shared publicly as well s privately on some of the subject matter he shred in this article. The question of self-regulation .vs government regulation is one we should all be interested in answering. Thompson continues the conversation and raising some great points in the article below…

Without question, self-regulation is better than government regulation. But when you remove the “regulation” out of “self-regulation,” it’s all sort of pointless. In other words, rules without penalties are meaningless.

I was recently speaking at the Association of Network Marketing Professionals conference. It’s at these sorts of conferences where professionals get a sense of what’s really going on in the industry. We all get together, in casual environments, and compare notes about who’s crushing it, who’s cheating and everything in between. The common frustration throughout the years has been this yearning for improvement. People in the industry have a deep, deep desire to elevate the profession to a higher status. But in an environment where “anything goes,” this has been an insurmountable task. The words have fallen on deaf ears, yielding zero progress. After all, how can you elevate an entire industry without (1) a set of rules; and (2) consequences for when those rules are violated. Currently, we’ve got #1 covered. We’re working on the second.

When people ask me how we can “elevate the profession,” the answer is crystal clear: we need to get more serious about self-regulation. It does ZERO good to have standards when it’s easy (and profitable) for people to infringe on those standards with no consequence. In an environment where there are no speeding tickets for driving 90 MPH in a 70 MPH zone, owners are forced to push the envelope, which leads to serious degradation in industry standards. We have good rules (that need to be improved). But once in, companies have never been…penalized. In an article written by DSA President, Joe Mariano, he makes it clear that better days are coming for ethics. In the article, he writes,